Anna Fox emerged in the 1980s as part of what might be called a new wave of British colour photographers that also included Paul Graham and Martin Parr. Her subject matter is the ordinary and the everyday, but she approaches it with an artist's eye for the absurd and the revealing.

An early series such as Basingstoke (1985-86) reveals the Hampshire town as a kind of microcosm of that mythical middle England where everything is so ordered and regulated as to be unreal. The images – Christmas trees for sale, wallpaper samples, a pristine redbrick house – are accompanied by random quotes culled from the Basingstoke Gazette – "Basingstoke is creating wealth and wealth pays for our social dreams". The humour is deadpan, ironic: a kind of low-key commentary on the way our aspirations are managed and fed, often at the expense of our wellbeing. An image of three men sitting staring at the corner of a makeshift office, where an array of cables falls from the ceilings towards now ancient-looking computers, has humour, but also an undertow of hopelessness. The caption reads: "This town needs love says priest."

As a kind of counterpoint, visual and metaphorical, Fox also shot a series in Hampshire between 1983 and 1996 called Afterwards, in which she used a miniature autofocus camera to capture some intimate shots of young people sleeping off the effects of a long night's partying at illegal raves. Here, the tone is bleaker and the sense of escapism and its costs is palpable. One image of a young man lying on a ragged mattress in a field, wrapped in a blanket, his hands over his eyes, surrounded by the detritus of the night before – cigarette papers scattered on the grass, a wrap, a beer can and, oddly, a tin-opener – evokes the mother of all comedowns. One is reminded, once again, how many other Englands there are, from the dutifully conformist to the doggedly dissolute, and how all exist side by side as if oblivious to one another.

This, perhaps, is Fox's great skill, evoking the rituals and everyday performances that underpin British culture and society. This retrospective book charts her movement into more personal territory and onwards into what might be called conceptual documentary. Both Cockroach Diary (1996-99), in which she made an artist's book recording an infestation of cockroaches at her shared London house, and My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words (1999), in which her mother's domestic sense of order is contrasted with her ailing father's often grotesque outbursts – "I'm going to tear your mother to shreds with an oyster knife" – evoke the chaos that lies simmering beneath the everyday in an altogether more intimate manner.

Her staged collaborations with musicians Alison Goldfrapp and Linda Lunus are interesting for the wilfully cold sexual glamour of the former and the more unruly shape-shifting of the latter. Both speak volumes about female identity and role-playing as well as the camouflage that a certain kind of artful performer uses in an age when the unmediated emotionalism of old – from Judy Garland to Janis Joplin – seems almost embarrassing. There are many Anna Foxs in these photographs, just as there are many Englands, but they are linked by her relentless, questioning, creative imagination that constantly asks us to consider what a photograph can tell us about ourselves and our myriad disguises.